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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 10 & 17, 2015
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER BOHLER
Barry McGee and Clare Rojas with Asha, his daughter by his late first wife, the artist Margaret Kilgallen.
ANNALS OF ART
A GHOST IN THE FAMILY
Love, death, and renewal in San Francisco.
BY DANA GOODYEAR
Early on the morning I went to see
the San Francisco artists Barry
McGee and Clare Rojas at their week-
end place, in Marin County, a robin
redbreast began hurling itself at a win-
dow in their living room. "It won't
stop," Rojas said. She picked up a
sculpture of a bird from the inside
sill to warn it o . When that didn't
work, Rojas instructed her fourteen-
year-old daughter, Asha, to cut out
three paper birds, which she taped
to the window, as if to say: GO
AWAY. "Can I let it in, Clare?" McGee
asked gently. Absolutely not, Rojas
answered. Thud.The bird hit the glass
again, and their three dogs barked
wildly. "I think it's time to let it in,"
McGee said. Rojas shook her head,
smiled tightly, and said, "Maybe it's
Margaret."
It was 1999, and Rojas was newly
graduated from the Rhode Island
School of Design, when she first saw
the work of the painter Margaret Kil-
gallen, who was thirty-one. It was at
Deitch Projects, in SoHo. For the ex-
hibit, a solo show called "To Friend +
Foe," Kilgallen had painted freehand
on the gallery walls, in a flat, folk-art
style, a pair of enormous brawling
women, one wielding a broken bot-
tle, the other with her fists up. At the
time, Rojas was painting miniature
dark-hearted fairy tales---girls in the
woods with fierce animals---and, like
many young painters, she was struck
by the scale of Kilgallen's work. "I was,
like, 'Who is this?' " Rojas told me.
"There were not many women artists
out there being outspoken and loud
and big and feminine. I remember say-
ing, 'I want to see big women every-
where now!' " Rojas was living in a
small apartment in Philadelphia, fold-
ing clothes at Banana Republic and
working as a secretary to pay o student
loans, painting her miniatures when
she got home, tired out, at night. She
couldn't wait to make big paintings
of her own.
Kilgallen, a book conservator at
the San Francisco Public Library, drew
upon old typography, hand-lettered
signs, and the gritty urban environ-
ment of the Mission, where she lived
and worked, to evoke a wistful, rough-
edged West Coast landscape. She used
leftover latex house paint in vintage
circus-poster colors like blood red,
ochre, and bird's-egg blue-green, and,
when she wasn't painting straight on
the wall, worked on found wood. She